Music Retrieval by Rhythmic Similarity Applied on Greek and African Traditional Music

This paper presents a method for retrieving music recordings by means of rhythmic similarity in the context of traditional Greek and African music. To this end, Self Similarity Analysis is applied either on the whole recording or on instances of a music thumbnail that can be extracted from the recording with an optional thumbnailing scheme. This type of analysis permits the extraction of a rhythmic signature per music recording. Similarity between signatures is measured with a standard Dynamic Time Warping technique. The proposed method was evaluated on corpora of Greek and African traditional music where human improvisation plays a key role and music recordings exhibit a variety of music meters, tempi and instrumentation.